More and more custom cooling solutions are starting to appear for Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285 videocards, with one of the more intriguing options belonging to MSI. The company has taken traditional heatpipe designs, fattened them up, and slapped them on its N285GTX SuperPipe OC graphics card.

"Today, MSI is pleased to announce the N285GTX SuperPipe graphics card, which not only brings to bear the powerful NVIDIA GPU - GeForce GTX 285, but, via the revolutionary ‘SuperPipe’ and Twin Frozr thermal design, offers a high performance and thermal efficiency graphics card," MSI wrote in a press release.

The aptly named SuperPipes consiste of 8mm thick heatpipes, which are up to 60 percent thicker than traditional heatpipes. According to MSI, the wider design leads to 90 percent better cooling performance. The N285GTX has been outfitted with five heatpipes in all, two of which are SuperPipes, on an all-metal heatsink with dual fans.

Engineers working together from Fusion-io and Hewlett Packard were able to achieve about 1 million IOPS (input/output per second) and 8GB/s sustained throughput in a custom-built HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server with four quad-core AMD Opteron processors. To reach the high level of IOPS, the server included five 320GB ioDrive Duos and six 160GB ioDrives.

"The ioDrive and ioDrive Duo are to supply the extreme storage performance (for data centers) at a fraction of the power, cooling, and per unit-of-processing-power price compared to traditional solutions," said David Flynn, chief technology officer of Fusion-io, in a statement.

The ioDrive and ioDrive Duos used consist of single level cell (SLC) flash memory and come rated for 48 years with the company's wear leveling algorithm. Both drives also utilize the PCI-E interface.

Things turned semi-chaotic yesterday in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and San Benito counties in California when it was discovered that ten fiber optic cables were purposely cut by vandals. At least one of the lines that were cut belongs to AT&T, whose lines were declared national Critical Infrastructure following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That means whoever is responsible for the vandalism is in violation of both federal and state laws, and to help make sure that they're caught, AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever did it.

More than 50,000 landline customers lost service as a result of the cuts, including both residential and business customers, as well as connections for ATMs, internet, and bank card transactions. Hospitals, stores, banks, police and fire departments who rely on 911 calls, computerized medical records, and more were all affected.

Anyone with information that could lead to the capture of those responsible is being asked to call 408-947-7867 or 650-802-4423.

Ever since we nearly died from our childhood playground’s cootie epidemic -- only to be saved when we decided to play doctor -- we’ve known that girls and boys are very, very different. And now, according to the Nielsen Company, there’s yet another reason to slap that “No Girls Allowed” sign on your tree fort: the fairer sex digs PC gaming way more than you.

Wait, what?!

So, what’s the catch? Well, 55% of all PC gameplay minutes can be attributed to females above the age of 25; that much is true. But guess what many of them are playing? That’s right: Solitaire. Barebones, no frills Solitaire. So much so, in fact, that Solitaire is the single most-played PC game, with 17 million players in December 2008.

The majority of female players – and therefore, most PC gamers – are casual gamers. Granted, Nielsen’s subjects allow their every online move to be monitored by some monolithic company, but other than that, we presume that they’re normal people.

So, what do we take away from this? For one, if you give people a game and the hardware to run it – whether manly man or girly girl – they’ll play it. Bundle Windows with a few games that prominently feature knights, kings, and queens sans the cards and we might be onto something. And second, that curvy Night Elf that keeps interrupting your grinding session with another, far more sinister variety of grinding? Probably a dude.

Do you play MMOs? Do you – as MMO-related Youtube videos have jammed into our noggins on many occasions – also listen to fantasy-oriented power metal? Well, if you’re anything like us, the two tastes go great together until the vocalist starts belting, yet, when he speaks of glorious battle, fails to mention game-specific character classes, locations, and damage stats. Totally kills the immersion of downing the same legendary baddy for the hundredth time.

Well, while Blue Öyster Cult and Warhammer Online haven’t quite satisfied our rigorous demands, they’ve certainly come close. See, as it turns out, clamshell-themed rock and rollers Eric Bloom and Richie Castellano are both card-carrying WAR addicts, so they teamed up with Mythic to put their love into the form of a song, while also avoiding potential lawsuits!

So, crank your speakers, put the horns in an upright position, and give it a listen. With any luck, it’ll wash away the taste of listening to DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and the Flames” for the – well, how many times have you downed that raid boss again?

Officials say that the spies – thought to be from Russia, China and other countries – only wanted to take stock of the American electrical infrastructure and intended no immediate harm. "There are intrusions, and they are growing," a former Department of Homeland Security official told the WSJ.

Both the Russians and Chinese have rebuffed the allegations against them. It is difficult to ascertain whether or not these cyber-saboteurs are acting at the behest of a foreign government.

According to the company, it was left with no other choice after two years of licensing talks didn’t bear any fruit. “We couldn’t find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action,” a spokesperson for the company told The NYT.

Elan has accused Apple of violating two off its patents related to touchscreen technology. It maintains that the MacBook and iPhone/iPod Touch violate its patent rights.

Earlier this week Microsoft was slapped with a $388 million verdict in a long-running patent infringement case against Uniloc.

The lawsuit claims that Microsoft’s means for activating products (such as Windows XP, Office XP and Windows Server 2003) infringed on a patent that Uniloc already owns, but Microsoft claims that they will appeal this verdict.

“We are very disappointed in the jury verdict,” wrote Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans. “We believe that we do not infringe, that the patent is invalid and that this award of damages is legally and factually unsupported. We will ask the court to overturn the verdict.”

If you've been worrying about computer security for awhile, you might remember when macro viruses in Microsoft Word and Excel files were at the top of the exploit list. These file formats, along with the omnipresent Adobe Reader PDF format, are once again among the biggest threat vectors being exploited by today's malware, according to a new report from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. Fittingly, the full report and a condensed key findings version are available in either PDF or Microsoft's own XPS formats. These reports cover the July-December 2008 period.

Some key findings include:

Scareware (which Microsoft calls "rogue security software") is on the rise, including the latest versions of our old friend Antivirus XP.

A slight reduction in unique vulnerability disclosures from 2007, but the High (most serious) category was larger in the second half of 2008 than in the first half of the year or the second half of 2007.

Applications continue to be the biggest target (86.7%, with browsers at 8.8%, and operating systems at only 4.5%)

When the iPod first boomed in popularity there were companies lining up around the block to sell accessories designed for the digital music player, and now it’s the netbook’s turn. The first generation of netbook-oriented accessories officially launched this week, and there’s little doubt that they’ll be the last to jump aboard this gravy train.

Kensington announced five products aimed at users of the tiny portables this week, and while the tiny wired and wireless mice ($14.99 and $24.99 respectively) won’t turn any heads, other items such as the power adapter (with a built in USB port for some extra charging power) do show off some solid insight ($49.99). And, if you’re concerned about your netbook’s safety or looks, you can snag the security lock ($24.99) or the sleeve ($14.99).

You can get all of these starting today off of Kensington’s website, or you can wait around until they end up on store shelves within a couple weeks.